City Cat Companion

A mobile app designed for City Cat Veterinary Clinic that helps cat owners feel fully prepared for appointments by bringing all essential visit information together in one place. The app eliminates stress and uncertainty from missing or scattered information, making every clinic visit clear, organized, and reassuring.

My Role

Service Designer
Product Designer

Skills

Service Design
Journey Mapping
UI/UX Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing

Team

3 Product Designers

Timeline

2 months

As part of a graduate-level course, Designing Information Experiences, we partnered with City Cat Veterinary Clinic of Seattle. Our collaboration with the clinic helped us focus on real customer needs and everyday challenges in a genuine clinic setting.

Cat owners often feel anxious and stressed before veterinary visits because they are unsure what to expect and how to prepare in order to ensure the best care for their cats.

of cats were perceived as stressed during veterinary consultations in a study observing 825 cats. [1]

of owners reported feeling stressed themselves in a study observing 819 owners. [1]

of cat owners consider the stress of their cat a significant factor when deciding whether to vaccinate according to Royal Canin Academy. [2]

PROBLEM

Design Challenge

How might we redesign the vet visit experience to make it less stressful and more transparent, empowering cat owners to confidently prepare for each appointment?

Solution

Key Features

All-In-One Preparation

City Cat app puts booking, pet reminders, and exam checklists in one place, giving owners everything they need to feel confident and ready for every visit.

Interactive Virtual Tour

The app’s gamified tour helps clients explore the clinic, meet staff, and learn how to check in nearby, making new environments more familiar and approachable.

Calm, Connected Waiting

Turn your car into an extension of the waiting room. Clients can check in when nearby and the City Cat app delivers real-time waiting updates and notifications, creating extra space and helping keep clients calm while they wait.

Key Findings

Method 2: Observational Studies

City Cat Veterinary | Note Taking

Note wait times as well as client and staff interactions- clinic “flow”
Evaluate space usage and stress points
Observe actual behaviors and emotions of client

Uncovering Gaps in Booking, Comfort, and Privacy at the Clinic.

To understand how cat owners experience the clinic and what drives their stress and decision-making, we used several research methods to identify pain points and improvement opportunities. Here’s how we approached our study and what we aimed to learn:

Method 1: Generative Interviews

3 Health Clinics | Semi-Structured

Uncover service, booking, and communication pain points
General understanding of staff workflows and clinic system gaps
Explore the handling of unpredictability

1. Inconsistent Information Delivery

City Cat clients are limited to email communication or the third-party booking platform, Booksy, which contains inconsistent content. Once an appointment is booked, owners receive no further pre-arrival information.

2. Impersonal and Inefficient Information Experience

The non-proactive and generic content make preparation confusing, leaving clients to sift through unrelated information to find what truly matters for their needs at the right time.

On the clinic website, clients encounter a broad, wiki-style format that fails to deliver clear, relevant guidance tailored to their specific visit.
Important messages about about payment are delivered generically in clinic signage rather than customized or shared digitally in advance, underscoring a one-size-fits-all approach.
Handout at the clinic about preparing your cat for a vet visit is available, but after arrival.

Clinic Website: wiki-style format

Pre-visit preparation handout at the clinic.

Research

3. Lack of Private Space

The clinic, while homey, is small. The waiting area has limited seating with noticeable noise from the printer and a window that looks into the first exam room.The small space allows sensitive front desk conversations to be heard throughout the clinic.

Three Pain Points Making City Cat Vet Visits Harder for Cat Owners:

Scoping

The Booking‑to‑Check‑In phase carried the highest concentration of friction and confusion.

Drawing from research, I co‑created a customer journey map of the virtual appointment experience, mapping client emotions, thoughts, and pain points at each step. This showed that the booking‑to‑check‑in phase was not only the most friction‑heavy part of the journey, but also where trust and first impressions were set.

Booking, check in, and pre‑visit prep already happen through digital channels, so improving them was the fastest way to reduce client anxiety and set clearer expectations without changing the physical space. I focused early design work on these moments instead of trying to fix the entire visit at once, turning it into a fun challenge to use screens to spotlight the clinic’s cat‑centric care and staff while still feeling like a warm, small business.

Framing the Experience

Metaphoric Design Ideas: “What if X were like Y?”

By asking the clinic to describe their ideal client experience, how they want visits to feel (safe, calm, inclusive, nonjudgmental) and what psychological needs they hope to meet (reassurance and confidence), and combining these answers with insights from client interviews, observations, and key problem areas, the design was grounded in a set of principles to deliver on the following priorities.

Showcase Clinic Character

What if Preparing for Your Cat’s Vet Visit were like Checking in for a Flight?

To generate design experiences, I embraced metaphorical design (Kensing & Madsen 1991), where one develops possible solutions by likening one thing to another in the form of “What if X were like Y?”

The idea that resonated strongly amongst the team was “What if taking a cat to the vet as akin to flight check-in or a visit to a premium airport?” This metaphor draws on the parallels of pre-visit chaos, while leveraging the way airlines/airports have mastered preparing and comforting passengers before their journey.

Designing an Emotionally Supportive Booking‑to‑Check‑in Journey

Narrowing in on premium experiences, specifically that of airport lounge.

Design Principles

Prioritize Cat and Owner Comfort

Effortless and Clear Early Touchpoints

I used the design principles to further guide me in down-selecting activities and feature ideas within our airport metaphor to address the key findings we outlined.

From there, I drafted a storyboard to visualize a successful version of the experience, focusing on mid-level actions, settings, and emotions, and goals.

Foster calm, respectful experiences that support both cat and owner’s emotional safety before and during visits.

Highlight City Cat’s unique philosophy cat‑centric practices, and staff, as well as the homey charm of a small neighborhood clinic.

Design booking, reminders, and check‑in to be simple, predictable, and easy to follow, so clients never have to piece together what to do next.

Ideation & Prototyping

Building out the Solution for Testing

I analyzed the pain points from the pre-arrival experience to view opportunities.

Each of us designed our own version of the home screen as a paper prototype.

Identifying and extracting the most effective overlapping ideas shaped the selection of cards and buttons for our paper prototype card sort.

As a team, we wanted to do a card sort to understand what information cat owners would prioritize in an app. Because we had limited time, I recommended that our team use a paper prototype for the first round of testing.

To prepare for the first prototype:

How do Users Envision the Home Screen?

Next, I led a 45 minute in-person card sort with cat owners, asking the user to arrange existing cards or create new ones for how they would envision a mobile home screen for this app.

From the final three different user configurations of the home screen, we finalized a reference layout of the mobile home screen to move into digital prototyping.

Summative Evaluation

Takeaways

Locking in Elements of the Home Screen

Refining User Experiences with High-Fidelity Testing

Before polishing the prototype, I reviewed airline apps like United, Delta, and Alaska to understand how they handle complex but familiar booking and day‑of flows.

Formative Evaluation

I then translated the strongest concepts into a high‑fidelity prototype, refining layout, hierarchy, and interactions so the end‑to‑end flow felt realistic.

Next, I ran a 60‑minute remote usability test with cat owners, asking them to walk through key tasks and think aloud, and used their feedback on what felt clear versus confusing to shape one final round of design tweaks before handoff.

Final Iterations

Usability Changes and Resulting Designs

What follows is a breakdown of the solutions developed through continuous user feedback and testing, culminating in our final iteration designs.

Overall homepage impressions were positive, but needed slight adjustments to how they were updated on wait times.

Users wanted not only pre-visit guidance, but also a clear outline of what to expect during the appointment itself.

Users found resources helpful, but not enough to warrant two different pages.

Impact

Increased Preparedness and Calm

Prospective clients responded positively to the concept. When asked to rate their confidence and preparedness after using the prototype, participants gave an average score of 8.2 out of 10, demonstrating strong perceived value.

“Usually before I go to a new place or visit the clinic, I will get anxious… this app helps make me feel less anxious because I can do check-ins and prepare for the visit.”

-P2

Potential to Drive Loyalty and Differentiation

“If this app is implemented… it might be the reason I will keep visiting this place and having my cat be a customer all the time.”

-P2

Reflection

Next Steps

Our experience solution focused more on first time clinic clients as well as unintentionally provided more information skewed towards those with cars as well. Although making first impressions are important, so is being able to continue to provide new useful information for returning users as well as being more inclusive for different types of client needs.

Balancing Stakeholders

“From the visuals, it seems homey… It makes me feel like they really care about my cat and making sure we have a good visit.”

-P3

In terms of lessons about experience design–metaphors are meant as a helpful guide, not an exact blueprint. You still have room to deviate away from certain aspects of the metaphor if it isn’t meeting the needs of the user. For example, our cat playlist was not as important as we thought it would be for “lounge” music, so we deprioritized it as “a sense” to play up in our experience.

With the design of our solution, I also realized that we focused a lot on preparing the user for their visit (service provider perspective), but equally important is the user’s perception of the clinic being ready for them. If I had to do this project again, I would definitely incorporate this service recipient mindset equally if not more.

Stronger Sense of Care

The app shifted how participants felt about the clinic, making it feel warmer and more caring. This qualitative signal suggests the experience can build trust and emotional safety before arrival.

Participants saw the app, especially the interactive tour, as a differentiator that could influence their choice of clinic. All three participants loved the tour, indicating it could help this clinic stand out from competing vets.